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2 For an important assessment of the historiography of southern education, see Best, John Hardin, “Education in the Forming of the American South,” in Essays in Twentieth-Century Southern Education: Exceptionalism and its Limits Urban, Wayne J. ed. (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1999), 3–18. A thorough synthesis of post-revisionist history of common schooling can be found in Kaestle, Carl F. Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983).Google Scholar

3 Best, , “Education in the Forming of the American South,” 12. Among the few studies addressing public education in the antebellum South are Pippin, Kathryn A., “The Common School Movement in the South, 1840–1860,” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1977); Knight, Edgar Wallace Public Education in the South (Boston: Atheneum Press, 1922) and Knight, The Influence of Reconstruction on Education in the South Teachers College, Columbia Univ., Contributions to Education, no. 60, (New York: Teachers College Press, 1913); Dabney, Charles William Universal Education in the South vol. I (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1936); Taylor, William R. “Toward a Definition of Orthodoxy: The Patrician South and the Common Schools,” Harvard Educational Review 36 (1966): 412–426; and Southern Cities, Southern Schools: Public Education in the Urban South, eds., Plank, David N. and Ginsberg, Rick Contributions to the Study of Education, No. 38 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990), 17–35. On public education in antebellum South Carolina, see Colyer Meriwether, History of Higher Education in South Carolina with A Sketch of the Free School System U.S. Bureau of Education, Circular of Information no. 3 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1889); Stoddard, James Alexander “Backgrounds of Secondary Education in South Carolina,” (M.A. thesis, University of South Carolina, 1924); Thompson, Henry T. The Establishment of the Public School System of South Carolina (Columbia: R.L. Bryan Company, 1927); and Jones, Lewis P. “History of Public Education in South Carolina,” in Public Education in South Carolina: Historical, Political, and Legal Perspectives, ed., McDaniel, Thomas R. (Spartanburg: Converse College, 1984), 1–29.Google Scholar

4 On planter reluctance to invest in human capital, see Wright, Gavin, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1986), 17–24.Google Scholar

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7 See Bellows, Barbara L., Benevolence Among Slaveholders: Assisting the Poor in Charleston, 1670–1860, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993); Quist, John W. Restless Visionaries: The Social Roots of Antebellum Reform in Alabama and Michigan, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998); Varon, Elizabeth R. We Mean to be Counted: White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).Google Scholar

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9 Ibid. 133–138.Google Scholar

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14 Ibid. Four excellent works which highlight the importance of independence and individual autonomy to antebellum white Southerners are Thornton, J. Mills III, Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama, 1800–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978); Hahn, Steven The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850–1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 15–85; Ford, Lacy K. Jr., Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); and McCurry, Stephanie Masters of Small Worlds: Yeomen Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).Google Scholar

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16 Knight, , Public Education in the South, 215–227. Barbara Bellows argues that the upcountry resisted changes in the school law because poorer farmers felt that any educational program would likely benefit larger towns in the state. See Bellows, Benevolence Among Slaveholders, 157.Google Scholar

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18 Burton, Orville Vernon, In My Father's House Are Many Mansions: Family and Community in Edgefield, South Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 80. Charleston is an important exception to the pattern of lowcountry resistance to structured public education. In the 1850s, growing concerns about class tensions in the city led to discussions about a new educational system which would encourage the integration of both rich and poor children in common schools. Christopher Memminger led a sustained effort to create a common school system supported by city taxes. In 1858, Charleston's first coeducational model school opened. These worries about class tensions were not as acute in rural areas and small towns where there were far fewer mechanics and white day laborers. For a discussion of Charleston's common school initiatives, see Bellows, Benevolence Among Slaveholders, 157–159 and Edgar, Walter South Carolina: A History (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998), 298–299. Urban areas in the South experienced more activity in public education overall. See Newman, Joseph W. “Antebellum School Reform in the Port Cities of the Deep South,” in Southern Cities, Southern Schools, 17–35.Google Scholar

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24 Inscoe, John C., Mountain Masters, Slavery, and the Sectional Crisis in Western North Carolina (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), 45–46.Google Scholar

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26 Henry, James Edward to Patterson, S. F. January 8, 1839 and January 14, 1840, Samuel Finley Patterson Papers, Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C. (hereafter, DU).Google Scholar

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29 On abolitionist arguments linking southern ignorance to slavery, see Walters, Ronald G., The Antislavery Appeal: American Abolition after 1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 72–78; Drew Faust points out that Southern intellectuals were marginalized in the antebellum South and turned to reforms that would strengthen the proslavery argument as an acceptable form of creative outlet. Similarly, common schools offered a way for educated leaders to support reform while negating abolitionist attacks. See Faust, Drew Gilpin A Sacred Circle: The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South, 1840–1860 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977).Google Scholar

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38 Porcher, Frederick, “Free School System in South Carolina,” Southern Quarterly Review, XXXI (October 1849): 32–33.Google Scholar

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43 I based my categories of wealth on three sources: In his classic study, Phillips, Ulrich B. classified planters as those owning twenty or more slaves while owners of five to nineteen slaves were considered middle class. See Phillips, U. B., Life and Labor in the Old South (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1963; originally published 1929), 339. Thornton, J. Mills adds that holders of fewer than five slaves and non-slaveowners were presumably lower-middle to lower class. See Thornton, Politics and Power in a Slave Society, 63. The problem with basing wealth on slaves alone is that a rich town physician might not own a single slave. As such, I have followed Jonathan Bryant's example of including real estate values in the equation. See Bryant, Jonathan M. How Curious A Land: Conflict and Change in Greene County, Georgia, 1850–1885 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 188. My wealth distribution chart for the signers of the 1853 petition is as follows: Category Wealth Number Lower-Middle Yeomen 0 slaves, $0 Real Estate 10 Middling Yeomen Less than 10 slaves, $200 - $2,500 Real Estate 10 Substantial Farmers/ More than ten slaves and/or 10 Professionals $2,501 - $10,000 Real Estate Source: Population and Slave Schedules, Spartanburg District, 1850 Manuscript Census Returns, NA. For a discussion of the literature and difficulties involved in determining wealth in the nineteenth-century South, see Campbell, Randolph B. “Planters and Plain Folk: The Social Structure of the Antebellum South,” in Interpreting Southern History: Historiographical Essays in Honor of Sanford W. Higginbotham, eds., Boles, John B. and Nolen, Evelyn Thomas (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 63–70.Google Scholar

44 Population and Slave Schedules, Spartanburg District, 1850 Manuscript Census Returns, NA.Google Scholar

45 Carolina Spartan, October 25, 1849.Google Scholar

46 Population and Slave Schedules, Spartanburg District, 1850 Manuscript Census Returns, NA.Google Scholar

47 Charles Bolton contends that, “Even in areas where adequate public schools did emerge, the greater economic necessity of child labor in landless families insured that poor white children would attend school less frequently than the children of yeomen families.” See Bolton, Charles C., Poor Whites of the Antebellum South: Tenants and Laborers in Central North Carolina and Northern Mississippi (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 55.Google Scholar

48 Abernethy, Thomas Perkins, From Frontier to Plantation in Tennessee: A Study in Frontier Democracy (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1967), 309–318.Google Scholar

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50 Piedmont Farmer: The Journals of David Golightly Harris, 1850–1870, ed., Racine, Philip N. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), 1,3,9.Google Scholar

51 Ibid. 34,52.Google Scholar

52 Ibid. 71.Google Scholar

53 Ibid. 181. Harris did succeed in getting a school started ten days later at his house with ten students under Mary Lanford's instruction, 183. The following June, Harris was pleased with his children's instruction but again expressed his annoyance that he had to arrange everything “to please others and pay all expense myself,” 198.Google Scholar

54 Ibid. 212.Google Scholar

55 Acts of the General Assembly of the State of South Carolina, Passed in December, 1852 (Columbia: Steam Power Press of R. W. Gibbes, 1853), 143.Google Scholar

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57 Carolina Spartan, March 2, 1854. Emphasis added.Google Scholar

58 Some of the many interpretations stressing the role of race in muting class tensions in the South are, Fredrickson, George M., The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971); Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975); and Harris, J. William Plain Folk and Gentry in a Slave Society: White Liberty and Black Slavery in Augusta's Hinterlands (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1985).Google Scholar

59 The classic work on the promotion of an orthodoxy in southern education in the antebellum era is Ezell, John S., “A Southern Education for Southrons,” Journal of Southern History 17 (August, 1951), 303–327. John McCardell argues that there were two distinct groups promoting higher education in the South: those with the primary goal of academic excellence, and those with the goal of southern educational orthodoxy. See McCardell, John The Idea of a Southern Nation: Southern Nationalists and Southern Nationalism, 1830–1860 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1979), 177–226. For a further discussion of southern educational orthodoxy, see Taylor, William R. “Toward a Definition of Orthodoxy: The Patrician South and the Common Schools,” Harvard Educational Review 36 (1966) : 412–426.Google Scholar

60 Green quoted in Ezell, “Southern Education for Southrons,” 306.Google Scholar

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62 The Carolina Spartan reprinted excerpts on Tucker's speech from the Laurensville Herald, Anderson Gazette, Newberrian, Newberry Sentinel, and Due West Telescope. See Carolina Spartan, March 23, 1854.Google Scholar

63 Carolina Spartan, December 22, 1853.Google Scholar

64 Carolina Spartan, March 9, 1854.Google Scholar

65 Ibid, October 27, 1853.Google Scholar

66 Ibid, November 24, 1853 and November 17, 1853. On the southern campaign to dignify manual labor, see Shore, Laurence Southern Capitalists: The Ideological Leadership of an Elite, 1832–1885 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 8–35.Google Scholar

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68 On Gregg's advocacy of education for factory operatives, see Smith, Alfred Glaze Jr., Economic Readjustment of an Old Cotton State: South Carolina, 1820–1860 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1958), 119 and Mitchell, Broadus William Gregg: Factory Master of the Old South (New York: Octagon Books, Inc., 1966, originally published 1928), 144–145.Google Scholar

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71 In addition to Sullivan, legislators Middleton, J.J. and Thomson, Thomas were quite vocal about their concerns over state centralization. See debates in Carolina Spartan, December 22,1853.Google Scholar

72 Carolina Spartan, December 21, 1854 and January 4, 1855. The final vote in the House was 51 yeas and 55 nays. See Carolina Spartan, December 20, 1855.Google Scholar

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76 Ibid, July 31, August 7, 14, 21, 28, 1856.Google Scholar

77 Ibid, August 21, 1856.Google Scholar

78 Ibid, March 18, 1858.Google Scholar